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Local communities in the Pacific have a high dependence on their natural resources for food and livelihoods. Managing small-scale fisheries resources through locally-managed marine areas (LMMAs) is an approach that has been scaled up to cover seventy-eight percent of inshore community fishing grounds in Fiji.

National SoE Reports give information about environmental and social conditions, trends and pressures for the country, and the surrounding seas. The SoE reporting process forms the basis for effective environmental and sustainable development planning by examining the current condition of environmental indicators influenced by national, regional, and global pressures. The report uses state and trend indicators to evaluate how these “state” conditions impact not only the environment, but also the economy and the livelihoods of a country’s citizens. The term “environment” is used holistically to include biophysical, social, and economic indicators. An SoE Report should be completed every five years.

Waterfronts are special places around the world. They have been key features of cities throughout history; are places of great beauty; and are sources of economic strength. Our aspirations for the Apia Waterfront are the same.

This dissertation examines the relationship between contemporary development projects and the Fijian idea vanua which is commonly translated as “land” but entails meanings of people, community, and custom. Often treated as a rigid cosmological entity with its own cultural order, in this dissertation I argue that when viewed as an environmental framework in which historical actors and ideas are constantly moving in and out, vanua is actually flexible, open-ended, and has the capacity to interact and collaborate with contemporary development projects such as environmental conservation and commercial farming. This capacity is built from the entanglement of diverse historical forces (e.g. indigenous politics, pre-colonial capitalism, colonial policies) which still resonate in the environment today, and is able to affect the realization of the universal values (e.g. environmentalism, development) intended to be introduced. Here I use a small coastal village called Waitabu located on Taveuni Island as the ethnographic setting to demonstrate how these processes are played out.

Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC)

This approach flourished in the twentieth century until it was suggested that locally grown herbs can be better for overall health and result in fewer side effects than antibiotics and other universally applicable and diagnosed materials

This report provides an overview of expected housing density changes and related impacts to private forests on America's islands in the Pacific and Caribbean, specifically Hawaii, Guam, America Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin islands. We discuss the vulnerability of island forests to conservation for housing development, introduction and spread of invasive species and risk of uncharacteristic wildlife, among other concerns.Island forests are subject to pressures that are similar to those on the mainland, including conversion of forest to housing, agriculture and industry; introduction and spread of invasive species; and risk of uncharacteristic wildlife. But islands by their nature, with relatively small pr constrained land areas and fresh water limitations, can be more vulnerable than mainland areas to such impacts.

As countries look forward to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Brazil in June 2012, evidence of certain environmental trends continues to accumulate, including those related to climate change and its impacts, biodiversity loss, and degradation of land and soils. Enormous challenges remain with respect to addressing the underlying causes and impacts of such trends, although positive developments can be reported as well, for instance in the area of renewable energy technology uptake and investment. Key environmental indicators such as those presented in the UNEP Year Book help keep track of the state of the environment by providing a picture of the latest available data and trends.

Areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ), or "high seas", cover around half of the planet’s surface and are home to a fragile and poorly known biodiversity. Over the past decades, threats against these areas have grown, linked to the exponential use of ABNJ and of their resources (overexploitation of fish stocks, illegal fishing, destructive fishing practices, oil and noise pollution, emerging threats linked to deep-sea mining…). Against this background, the international community felt necessary to engage the discussions on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in ABNJ. This has been done under the auspices of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and of its Ad-Hoc Open-ended Informal Working Group to study issues relating to the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity beyond areas of national jurisdiction (BBNJ Working Group). Within this framework, States must decide by the end of the 69th session of the UNGA (2014) if they agree to launch the negotiations of an Implementing Agreement to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

The regionally unique Constitution of the Republic of Vanuatu provides that ―all land in Vanuatu belongs to custom owners and their descendants‖ and that the ―rules of custom shall form the basis of ownership and use of land.‖1Implementing this principle, however,after decades of land alienation by foreign ersusing alien laws has proven to be challenging. Concerns over actual and perceived problems of land alienation through leasing in Vanuatu triggered a National Land Summit in 2006,2followed by an Interim Transitional Implementation Strategy and a National Land Review, all of which set the stage for a legislative and administrative reform agenda and served as a guide to short-and long-term assistance to the land sector.